Fiction
against Intolerance: The Voices of the Wounded
Rujie
Wang, College of Wooster
To
some extent it can be said that the history of the twentieth-century China
is
written in the blood of the victims of intolerance. Quite contrary to the
general
belief that people became liberated from the oppression of traditions
in
the course of social progress, the realities of Chinese modernization
sometimes
prove just as oppressive and "cannibalistic." This paper examines
many
acts of intolerance in modern Chinese fiction that depict the realities of
the
Cultural Revolution and outlines the general struggle of modern Chinese
intellectuals
to preserve humanity as defined in Confucianism.
The
works written against the intolerance of the Cultural Revolution include,
"Scar,"
(Lu Xianhua, 1979), "Unrequited Love" (Bai Hua, 1979),
"Bolshevik
Greetings,
(Wang Meng, 1979), "Ah, Man!" (Dai Houying, 1980) "Six Chapters
from
My
Life in the Cadre's School" (Yang Jiang, 1981), "A Small Town Called
Hibiscus"
(Gu Hua, 1983), and "Women Are One Half of Men" (Zhang Xianliang,
1985).
Composed from within the intellectual tradition of the past and against
its
values of religious tolerance, self-sacrifice, and social harmony, these
works
are self-reflections of the revolutionary discourses responsible for the
deviation
and perversion of human nature on a massive and unprecedented scale.
In
these fictional works, we begin to see the "reasons" underlining much
of the
atrocities,
human indignities, and the destruction of the individual that come
to
characterize the twentieth-century Chinese experience.